50 people found this review helpful
3 people found this review funny
Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 7.5 hrs on record
Posted: Dec 26, 2014 @ 10:39am
Updated: Dec 26, 2014 @ 10:41am

I had a very hard time deciding if I should give this game a thumbs up, or thumbs down. TL;DR: This game is too short, the story left wholly unfinished, and your choices matter much less than the game leads you to believe. Purchase only on a good sale.

At first blush, this game is evocative and intriguing; the artwork is beautiful and the characters well-wrought. It's sort of an Oregon Trail meets turn-based RPG, and the story appears vast and your choices deeply important.

Unfortunately this game fails to deliver in three key areas: choice, story, and length.

At the beginning you feel like your choices matter. Make a wrong decision and you run out of food, or an important character dies. Later, you realize that you're pretty firmly on the rails; you might save people here or there, but in the end, it doesn't really matter much who lives and who dies. I was deeply disappointed to discover this, as the game felt like it offered really gritty options in the beginning.

The story and length problems go hand-in-hand--this feels like a book you slam shut in the middle and never pick up again. There are so many loose threads that doesn't have answers, so many stories left untold. The ending felt so abrupt that I had to do some internet searches to see if I'd somehow screwed up and ruined my game, or if the credits just happened to roll in the middle. It didn't end, it just dropped off into oblivion. I got roughly six hours of gameplay out of this, so the $10 sale price tag wasn't too bad. If there's a sequel released, I'll pick it up for roughly the same price...but for now I feel cheated. Not in price, but in story. There's so much left unfinished that I feel unsettled, and the realization that my choices matter not is rather disappointing as well.
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1 Comments
Joe Sandles Jan 2, 2015 @ 7:33am 
It's gonna be a trilogy, so yeah, we'll see a couple more games to conclude the story.